


Icing

by whisperwhisk



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 17:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5634772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperwhisk/pseuds/whisperwhisk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade isn't the easiest person to comfort even in the best of times. After John and Davesprite die, Nanna has her work cut out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Icing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phantasmalreality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantasmalreality/gifts).



                                    

                Space, thought Jade, sounded weird.

                It wasn’t strange! If you could factor in frequency, amplitude, wavelength, vector, and pressure differential as impacted by the ability to resize objects at will even _before_ you gained a comprehensive understanding of every law governing spatial reality – no, _strange_ wasn’t the word for it at all. _Strange_ was a word for things that were confusing, like toilets, or cute feathery orange boys. It’s just that when Jade leaned forward and flicked her ear toward the miniature Land of Wind and Shade floating in the center of the room, it sounded…different. _Weird_.

                She could hear the constant moaning of the wind, but even just an inch away from her ear, it was distorted and oddly high-pitched. That was the work of the pressure differential– you couldn’t shrink a planet down to the size of a baseball without doing _something_ funny to its atmospheric pressure – but the sound it produced was eerie.

                With the pitch distorted by the miniature planet’s compressed atmosphere and amplified by Jade’s sharp ears, she could almost hear something tucked between the whistles and howls of the tiny, endless windstorm. It sounded like an instrument – a harmonica, maybe? – but she could almost make out words in there, a deep voice pitched far up. She listened closer, almost dipping the tip of her ear into the thick clouds around the planet.

                No, those were definitely words – but they were nonsense. Maybe she’d hear them better if she shrunk herself down to cancel out the distortion, or maybe – _ohhhhh_. This must be something from John’s quest!

                If it was, she figured she ought to leave him alone for it. He’d been thinking of working on it, and if he’d finally got around to it…well, that put him farther along than she was. She ought to work on hers too, but she couldn’t figure out what there was left to do! She and Dave had pretty much gone through everything on her planet. They’d lit the Forge, gathered all the frogs, and then…

                Jade glanced toward another tiny planet, this one with a volcano. Well, _then_ Dave had run up to Jack Noir and fucking DIED. From _her_ bullets, while she could only stand and watch, finger on the trigger, chill air frozen in her lungs. And he’d known what was coming, he must have seen it, and he didn’t even warn her, or say goodbye, or-

                Well, anyway. Now that the Genesis Tadpole had fallen into the Forge like some kind of magic ring – that seemed practically the only place a magic ring could fall for some reason – she really didn’t see any reason to go back to her planet. There just…wasn’t anything left to do.

                But LOWAS was interesting. John never had a chance to do his quest, so this would be good time spent between him and Davesprite, plumbing the depths of his windy planet for treasure and self-discovery, and-

                _BANG_.

                A sound like a firecracker exploded inside her ears. A vast buzzing noise took up the entire room and nestled inside her brain, and she stumbled, fell, and waited for it to stop.

                It subsided, and she sat up. What had happened? The room was the same. Shining gold walls, cozy couch for chilling out or cuddling or napping, little table, orbiting planets…

                _The planets._ Something was wrong with the planets. They were unharmed, but their cheerful orbit around them was different, and…

                Then she realized. There were only four.

                She counted them.

                _One. Two. Three. Four._

                That couldn’t be right.

                _One. Two. Three. Four!_

                Wrong again.

                _ONE TWO-_

                Eyes scanning back and forth-

                _THREE-_

                from planet to planet to planet-

                (maybe she had started wrong – better count again – better to be sure –)

                _ONE-_

she stepped forward-

                _TWO-_

                and saw-

                _Three…_

                on the floor-

                _four._

                dust. Piled.

                And a burn mark.

                It was LOWAS.

                LOWAS had exploded.

                She didn’t need to use her expanded senses, she could smell it, she _knew_ it. There was no need to look deeper, but she found herself peering into the molecular structure of the dust. Carbon, with trace amounts of iron, zinc, and other metals – but there wasn’t a hint of structure to it. The planet hadn’t just exploded, it had _disintegrated_ , been shorn molecule from molecule and atom from atom.

                John and Dave – Davesprite – were in there, somewhere. What was left of them.

                Jade’s breath had frozen in her lungs.

                She should have known what was coming. If she’d paid attention, been ready instead of just spacing out and wasting time like an _idiot_ , or gone with them, or – or –

                The rest of her body was still, but her hand rose. With a green spark and a fragment of thought, the dust rose from the table and swirled. Over several minutes, atoms became molecules became ash, and ash became stone and petrol and metal, and they wove together into caves and pipes and tunnels layer by layer.

                But…it wasn’t working. She hadn’t reached the surface and she could already tell it wasn’t working, because even though every tunnel and pipe and cave came together just as they were before, not a single living thing was among them. Not a consort. Not a firefly. And not…

                Her vision grew watery. Her hand quivered. The planet crumbled.

 

                –

 

                The cake smelled delicious. Lemon and vanilla frosting. The frosting would be rich and creamy and sweet, the cake fluffy but moist. And there was a bit of…was that coconut? Yes, definitely coconut. Jade loved coconut. Nanna must have overheard her mentioning it at some point.

                She never would have made coconut cake for John. John had hated coconut.   

                Jade buried her face in the couch pillow.

                Stupid Nanna, making all those cakes. Stupid dog nose, smelling them. She couldn’t stop either of those, but she could at least curl up on the couch. Nanna wouldn’t bother her then. She could wake up when it was over.

                Time passed. She didn’t sleep. There was a clock across the room, on the mantelpiece, ticking away. It was a tiny sound, but the room was quiet, and Jade’s ears twitched and perked and picked up every sound whether she wanted them to or not.

                Jade sat up. She sniffed the air. Nanna was baking in the other room. Good.

                Jade straightened her back and squared her shoulders. She glared at the clock.

                It exploded.

                A bit louder than she expected.

                “Jade?” drifted a voice from the kitchen. Even after years of talking with sprites and their distorted, echoing voices, the sound still seemed odd. It made a kind of sense – Jade felt like talking to the dead ought to be at least a _bit_ creepy. John never had any problem with it, and…and Davesprite –

                A single sob escaped her mouth. She choked the next one in her throat. _Davesprite._

                In the other room, Jade heard Nanna set down a pan. She was about to come through the wall investigate. Jade flicked her finger, and the pieces of the broken clock snapped back into proper shape – but they were still _broken_. To truly fix the clock, she’d have to knit the pieces back together on a molecular level, and that took time, which she didn’t have.

                “Jade, dear.” And here she was. She hovered in the center of the room, tail trailing genie-like back into the fireplace. “Is everything alright?

                “Um. Yeah.” Nanna didn’t seem to notice that she’d phased right through the destroyed clock. “Everything is fine!”

                “I just heard a sound, you see, and I was-”

                “You were worried about me again.”

                “Not at all, hoo hoo!” Nanna drifted over to the end table and began dusting. “I was curious!”

                “Oh!” With Nanna dusting the end table, Jade had full view of the broken clock. If she got rid of it now, Nanna wouldn’t see, but the sound of it vanishing would be unmistakable. “I was…I was just practicing!”

                “With your powers?”

                “Yeah! I’ve been looking for new ways to use them.” That much was true, or at least _had_ been. “Uh…want to see?”

                “I’d love to.”

                “Okay. Stand back?”

                Jade and Nanna both glanced at Nanna’s distinct lack of legs. Nanna drifted backward.

                “A while back John and I were practicing,” said Jade. “He had learned to transform himself into the wind itself. It made him very hard to find, and even if I found him nothing I tried…” She ran out of words. Then she caught Nanna’s eye, and made herself keep talking. “Nothing could touch him like that,” she said. It was true. If Jade had noticed, if she’d been paying attention, if she’d alerted him, if she’d been _doing her job_ … “Nothing could hurt him.”

                “Ah, yes,” said Nanna. “The two of you were always so inventive! Why I recall at the very beginning…”

                Nanna didn’t stop. Every word felt like a pebble dropped in Jade’s stomach; soon it would be too much. As she sat and did her best not to listen, images flashed through her mind, memories of herself in green, with a long sprite’s tail, sobbing uselessly – and memories of _being_ that sprite, stuffed with all the power of the Green Sun but paralyzed by despair, her own face screaming at her.

                “…but my grandson discovered through careful use of his punch designix, he could-”

                “ _So!_ ” snapped Jade. “I figured out I could do really interesting things by using my powers on a smaller scale.”

                Nanna’s concealed shock gave over to curiosity.

                “Uh. Like this.” Jade steadied her hand, then raised it. She shrunk the air at the tip of her finger down to a hundredth of its size, creating a vacuum around it which drew in more air, which she shrunk as well. Then, from the inside out, she expanded the air back to its normal size, making sure to keep it trapped within the same baseball-sized sphere. As she expanded more and more air in the pressurized sphere, it crew cloudy, then opaque.

                She remembered striking Jadesprite’s face.

                She remembered Jade striking her face.

                She flinched, and the sphere exploded.

                They both flew across the room: Jade onto the couch, which made a worrying crunching noise, and Nanna into the fireplace, where she disappeared in a cloud of ash.

                The room became very quiet. Nanna said nothing; Nanna didn’t move. Nothing moved but ashes, drifting downward.

                Jade tried to speak, but nothing came out. She got up and moved across the room, a step at a time. This was bad.

                No, having all the power in the world without knowing how to use it was _bad_. Being Jadesprite was _bad_ , letting John and Davesprite die was _bad_.

                This was…she stepped forward, numb. This was-

                A ghostly blue pie burst from the ashes, and next thing Jade knew, the world tasted like banana cream.

                “HOO HOO HOOOOOOO!” Nanna’s voice echoed all about the room. “That was quite a prank! The old Colonel would be mighty proud of you!”

                Jade lay on the ground awhile, then pulled the pie off her face. Nanna was hovering over her, a great big bucktoothed smile on her face, hand stretching down to help her up.

                Jade stared at Nanna’s hand. It didn’t go away.

               

                –

               

                Time passed, and in time, this is what a typical day would be like.

                On a typical day, Jade would wake up. How long she’d slept, she would have no idea. At some point on this ship, time had lost meaning, and with the clock damaged, the room was silent as the ruins of Jade’s home. Nanna hadn’t got rid of the clock’s remains, for some reason.

                Instead, Jade had learned to measure time by plates. Every day, five or six more would in the living room, most still full of Nanna’s increasingly elaborate kitchen experiments.  Every three days, they would all vanish, gone to the kitchen for cleaning. On a typical day, there would be seven or eight or twelve. Jade would know that number meant something, but she wouldn’t remember what.

                “Jade,” Nanna’s voice would drift from the kitchen several times a day. “You haven’t…” Her voice would peter out, muffled, then returned as she phased through fireplace. “…all day! I know things have been hard lately, but you really should have a bite.”

                Jade would her eyes. She would turn her head from the pillow, to the floor, up to Nanna. “Nnnno. Don’t gotta.”

                “Of course you do,” Nanna would say. “All living things must eat!”

                “Don’t. M’immortal.”

                “Of couse. Have some cake.”

                And that would be that.

                Mostly, Jade slept. Sometimes, Nanna would drift in to talk. Sometimes, Jade would answer her.

                She was doing it less than before.

                 

                –

 

                Jane Egbert didn’t know how to do this.

                For starters, she was old, and Jade was young. It had been a long time since she’d been a teenager. Heck, it had been a long time since she’d _had_ a teenager, and she was out of practice. But that wasn’t all, not even a bit. Even in the most tempestuous phases of his youth, her son’s life had been…well, ordinary. She’d made very sure of that. It had cost her, and she’d pay that price ten times over. He’d grown up with two living parents, with friends he could see and touch, with community and love.

                She looked down over the towering stack of plates she held at her sleeping grand-niece. Jade. This girl, this wonderful, heroic, alien child had none of those luxuries – at least, not in a way Jane understood. She’d found friends, found love, but that wasn’t the same as growing up with it.

                Jane understood _that_ perfectly well.

                But that didn’t help. When your first friend is loneliness, silence always comes second. Jade understood that just as well as Jane. She’d never say so, but it was said in weeks of shared silences, of Jade’s feigned sleep as Jane told her stories from the past. Yes, Jade could trust her– the girl had never relaxed around an adult before – but she would never _confide_ in her. It was partly because Jade was young and Jade was old, and partly because Jade associated her with John, quite rightly.

                But that didn’t help either. There was another reason, one that Jade didn’t even know. While their silences were the same, their lonelinesses were precisely opposite. Jane’s was born of rules and order and absolute obedience, and it spoke the language of boundaries and their breaking. Jade’s was born of having no boundaries at all. It took Jane  a long time to understand that could be just as constraining, and could make offers of help just as hard to accept.

                Jane just wished she could be the person Jade needed. Sometimes it was a bit sad being the one who just made the cake.

                Still…she could make the cake.

                It wasn’t enough, but it would be enough.          


End file.
